‘Last chance for Best Western,’ he said, one foot on the first step of the bus. I shook my head. ‘You’re sure?’ He couldn’t quite let it go.

‘I’m sure,’ I said. I gave him the biggest smile, my best smile, one that said I know what I’m doing.

‘Your funeral,’ he said, and he climbed back up into his seat. But as he dropped the coach into gear and the engine powered up he called out through the open door, ‘Just promise me, even though you’re all about how great death is and all that, promise me you won’t die tonight, alright? I don’t want that on my conscience.’

‘I’ll do my very, very best,’ I said. ‘But if it’s my time . . .’ and I held my arms open in mock resignation. He laughed and pushed the lever forward, and the doors hissed shut and the bus moved away with the driver still smiling and shaking his head inside.

I dropped my arms back to my sides and watched the twin red tail-lights of the bus recede for the longest time until finally they disappeared over an invisible black horizon. And then, as I stood alone in the darkness of the road, a deep twinging discomfort passed through my abdomen. I stood still and breathed through it. I breathed steadily – steadily, steadily, not thinking about it, breathing – until it was gone.

2

Day one of year twelve was going to be my life from then on. Start out as you mean to continue. Wasn’t that the saying? University was going to be hard. And long. Long daily hours, long years of studying; intense commitment for over nine years into the future. So this day one of year twelve I considered to be my first day of a decade’s work. Only it wasn’t my first day, of course. Of course I had already been studying. I had in fact already precised the first three chapters of my maths textbook, my chemistry textbook and my physics textbook. Biology seemed more immediately accessible, so I’d shifted it down the priority list and had only made bulleted notes.

99.95

This was the number that I kept in my head at all times.

99.95

I stuck it on the wall over my desk at home. I wrote it in the top right-hand corners of my notebooks, on the inside covers of my textbooks, on little stickers on the casing of my tablet and my laptop.

Never relax, that number said. Anything lower was too risky. Last year’s lowest admission for medicine at the University of New South Wales was 96.20, but when you took into account the UCAT and the interview and special admissions criteria and university discretion . . . well, 96.20 wasn’t good enough. Not by a long shot. Even 99.94 seemed risky. Only a perfect rank of 99.95 would do. And I had every intention of getting it. There was no reason for me to fail. I was disciplined. It was simply a matter of choosing it and working for it.